carrieob

I want one... but the reviews on Amazon aren't so great. Although it sounds like the firmware updates help. This one does seem better than that other wifi robot they've had - the Erector Spykee one. I think I might just hold out for better/cheaper technology, though...

zombiekicker

SSchwartz wrote:I wonder if I dress this up in a little green dog suit if it'll help me take over the world... unless, of course, it dumps it's fuel to make room for cupcakes or endlessly makes waffles.

eberin

In for one - I could never get my web cam working at home, but this MOBILE unit has MANY possibilities; check the kitties out whenever the wife needs her see her 'babies', monitor the house when the alarm goes off (and dials my cell phone). I am sure there are many other possibilities.

Shiftlock

equazcion wrote:Ooooooooohhhh, what a cool useless novelty. If I had 100 bucks to flush down the toilet, this is where it would go. Dammit.

Not necessarily just a useless toy. I'm seriously considering one for the summer home that is left unattended for up to eight months at a time. Maybe even a second one for the upstairs rooms. I'm still worried by the docking problems though, because if it refuses to dock and charge, it would sit useless for months (unless I got all NASA on it and figured out a way to remotely give it some juice).

Shiftlock

Does anybody know the voltage that the base supplies to it while charging? I want to use it in a location where the power is turned off by hooking the base up to a solar-charged battery. I'm hoping it's 12V. That's what powers the wireless router and cable modem there.

garrettw87

a problem i foresee is that it has no defensive capabilities. what if someone comes along and picks your little rovio up off the ground, derailing your mission? what can you do?

i say it should be able to give 'em a little electric shock, which of course means that when the perp drops it (in a position other than squarely on its wheels, of course), it would need to be able to right itself.

julieacooper

Ok, so you can drive it around and see your cat. If you have time to watch this gristle remotely, then whatever you're out doing probably isn't that pressing. Ok, maybe that's a little harsh but seriously, what are you going to do with this thing?

dollarmtn

smackhq

I'm in.
I purchased the Spykee one on here as well and it's awesome so I'm hoping this one does well and the bad review are just from people that dont know how to work tv remote. Great to use in office.

JediNick23

Programmers can have a lot more fun with the Rovio than many of WowWee's other products. I was in a team of 5 students in a class that spent a whole semester working with one.

Right out of the box, the rovio isn't "programmable" in the sense of being able to write something in C or Java or whatever and save it onto the rovio itself. But since the api at http://www.wowwee.com/static/support/rovio/manuals/Rovio_API_Specifications_v1.2.pdf shows how to send commands over HTTP to get it to do stuff, you CAN write a program that instead runs on your computer, and have the computer send/receive wirelessly to the rovio.

So if the phrase Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping mean anything to you, then you'll love hearing that yes, it's possible. We did it. The rovio would take webcam shots, send them back to the computer, the computer would analyze the view and decide what to do next, then send the next movement/camera commands to the rovio.

The biggest issue we had with it was that with our team's Java program, the wheel encoders didn't seem to work as the api described (hopefully fixed in an update by now) so we used dead reckoning back then. A competing team writing in C instead claims their wheel encoders worked fine.

JediNick23

an addendum to my previous post to explain why we used dead reckoning: at no point in our school project were we even allowed to use TrueTrack. Given a good enough program, you might be impressed with how well you can get this thing to navigate without TrueTrack beacons (especially if, like that competing team instead of my team like I mentioned, you can get the wheel encoders to work).

Woot.com is operated by Woot Services LLC.
Products on Woot.com are sold by Woot, Inc., other than items on Wine.Woot which are sold by the seller specified on the product detail page.
Product narratives are for entertainment purposes and frequently employ
literary point of view;
the narratives do not express Woot's editorial opinion.
Aside from literary abuse, your use of this site also subjects you to Woot's
terms of use
and
privacy policy.
Woot may designate a user comment as a Quality Post, but that doesn't mean we agree with or guarantee anything said or linked to in that post.